Guest Post: Dealing with Denial by Marolyn Krasner |

Happy Friday!

Please welcome Marolyn Krasner. Marolyn is giving away one ebook of The Radicals. More details about the giveaway are below.

Dealing with Denial

I’m not going to lie, I’m still in denial that Donald Trump is president. Even that sentence was hard to write because of those last four words.

My fiction is often closely related to things that I am afraid of and denial is one of the ways fear shines through for me. That guy and the people that support him, they scare me. They scare me because the hurt they cause is sinister and unnecessary and real. It’s a past time for them. It’s about winning.

I was 13 when I decided to be a writer. I didn’t decide that I was going to write fiction. I was going to be a newspaper reporter because I wanted to pursue the truth. I had seen the film All the President’s Men, a film about reporters and another bad president. IMBD has this description of the film: The Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein uncover the details of the Watergate scandal that leads to President Richard Nixon’s resignation.

I pursued journalism obsessively. It got me through teenhood and college and then after about six months as a newspaper reporter, living in my mom’s house, I quit. I was scared about my future because the newsroom was not an environment of creativity or truth telling. It was boy’s club. It was inhumane on some levels. It sucked.

I quit my job and my trajectory toward a life of journalism floated away like a balloon. It was an exciting and uncertain time in my life. It was when I started writing fiction. Another scary and exciting thing happened at that time. I started coming out to myself and the people close to me. Again, I was scared. I had to tell my family. I was scared of rejection. Scared of not having a professional path. Scared of dating women. One of the byproducts of this fear was a lot of creative productivity.

20 years later. I’ve lived a lot of life. I’ve written a lot of stories with no endings. I live in a cul de sac, I have a wife, two kids and it’s November 2016.

I had been working on this male character who was a white supremacist, a gun rights twitter happy mofo. I hated him and I loved writing about him because I was afraid of him. I decided to explore his polar opposite. A middle aged, queer radical feminist. These two characters became father and daughter. They were estranged from each other. They were also estranged from societal norms. These characters had extreme views. If I met either one of them at a party, I would exit the conversation as quickly as possible, but I would spend the rest of the night watching their behavior from a distance because they are intriguing.

My book is called The Radicals and I’m really happy that it helped me get through those first two years of his presidency. When the reality of family separation and the Muslim ban and white supremacist in chief got to be too much, I could sit down and write something funny and I felt better. My book won’t save the world, but it might make someone’s commute less boring.

THE RADICALS

by Marolyn Krasner

After twenty-five years of extremist feminist activism, D is on probation for assaulting homophobes and she is becoming something she never wanted to be: respectable. D’s mom and girlfriend hope her life as leader of the feminist collective Pussy Power is over, but D feels like a failure. When she finds out her estranged father has jumped on the white power bandwagon and is sharing the personal details of marginalized people on his badly designed website, she reconnects with her toxic Pussy Power cofounder and triggers a chain of events that causes her new life to implode, which is very bad, but is also exactly what she wants.

There is mention of anorexia, rape, but no graphic descriptions.

GIVEAWAY

Win an ebook copy of The Radicals. All you have to do is leave a comment below telling me the name of the author of The Radicals. Hint: It’s Marolyn Krasner. One winner will be selected on July 28th.

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